In 1978 he very nearly lost his life on one of these early test flights, crashing from 250 feet after his craft went into an uncontrollable dive, which left him with an understandable fear of heights but at the same time quite failed to deter him from planning the first ever microlight flight to Australia. In this enterprise he was forestalled by Eve Jackson who had set out without any publicity and the minimum of cash, in the smallest microlight on the market, to attempt the journey at her leisure, taking fifteen months to complete the flight.
Brian Milton adjusted his Australian sights to the concept of trying to beat the race record made in 1919 by the Australian Ross Smith who flew from London to Australia in a Vickers Vimy bomber with a crew of three in 172 hours of actual flying time. Milton’s objective was twofold – to beat Ross Smith’s record from London to Sydney and to reach Sydney in time for the 250th anniversary of the Australian Commonwealth.
He was partially successful, taking fifty-nine days, compared with Ross Smith’s ninety-six days, but unfortunately arrived three days after the celebrations. It was, however, still a considerable achievement in which all his resolution had been needed. He had crashed when landing on a Greek island, nearly writing off his machine, and had then ditched in the Persian Gulf on Christmas Day while the Iranians were attacking two tankers a few miles to the north. He still had to struggle with the fear of heights, born from his first crash. It was at its worst over India, flying in haze over the dusty plains with nothing to distract him. He was conscious of a djinn standing on the nose of the craft, telling him to jump. It was terrifyingly real. The djinn vanished if he had things with which to occupy his mind, so as a last resort he would imagine making love to any girl he could summon up in his thoughts.
The idea of setting himself another and more ambitious target to race against now obsessed Milton who admits it was fuelled by anger at the lack of notice his Australian flight had received in microlighting circles. This time he would microlight around the world in eighty days, the challenge set in Jules Verne’s classic. He began looking for a sponsor to bring his dream to life.
He wrote innumerable letters but was turned down every time, though Richard Branson, heavily involved in his own ballooning venture, at least took the trouble to reply personally. Eventually Brian netted a sponsor, the Liechtenstein Global Trust, a little-known but lucrative fund management company. They were prepared to put up the £300,000 he reckoned he needed in return for the microlight being called GT Global.
A friend, Keith Reynolds, a first-class mechanic and experienced hang-glider and microlight instructor with whom Brian had often flown, was passionately interested in the project and suggested Milton should use a two-seater weight shift trike with a larger engine than he had used on the Australian flight. Brian had already decided he wanted a companion on a flight of this magnitude and invited Keith to join him as mechanic and alternative pilot. But their relationship was not one of equal footing. Keith Reynolds was put on the payroll, being guaranteed twenty-five weeks work at £800 a week.
The new machine looked like a tricycle motor scooter slung under a hang glider wing. The pilot and pillion passenger sat on scooter seats with no protection from the elements, with the powerful eighty horsepower engine mounted behind the pillion, its propeller facing backwards. The pilot steered with a control bar linked to the wing pivoted above the trike. Pulling it back tilted the wing down to make it go taster, while pushing it away, raised the wing, causing the craft to climb and therefore go more slowly. Swinging the bar to right or left changed direction. There was also a rudder bar for the feet but this was only used while taxiing to change the direction of the front wheel. The only other control was the throttle, which could be manipulated by hand as well as by foot. Brian found it an aesthetically pleasing machine to fly, for it relied so directly on the pilot’s weight and muscle. He described it as a cross between riding a cross-country motorbike and a wild horse. Because there were none of the confines of a cockpit, visibility on all sides was superb and there was an accentuated feeling of speed and flight as the air rushed past. In turbulent air it became a real battle with the elements, calling for a gorilla grip on the control bar.
The average cruising speed was around fifty-six miles per hour though Brian got up to 102 with a following wind when flying through the Rockies. His ceiling was limited to how high he could fly without supplementary oxygen. The highest he reached was when he flew at 12,000 feet over the Greenland Ice Cap. Carrying about twenty-six gallons of fuel he could manage a maximum of 500 miles in normal conditions without refuelling. With the rush of air and the noise of the engine it was impossible for pilot and pillion rider to hear each other, so communication was by radio fitted inside their helmets, and on the frequent occasions that the radios failed, they had to resort to signals. It was all very basic but robust. The craft could take quite a hammering in the air and even land in a cross wind of thirty-five miles per hour. It was also relatively easy to service and fix when inevitably things went wrong.
Conflict becomes a recurring theme in the story of Brian Milton’s venture. His twenty-four-year-old marriage had ended three years earlier; that of Keith Reynolds ended shortly after Brian invited him to join the project. At least they were now both in the same boat, or in this case, trike. Milton soon fell out with his PR manager, Simon Newlyn. At one stage in December 1997, only a few weeks before the announcement of their sponsorship, GT Global threatened to pull out of the arrangement. Richard Branson reappeared on the scene with first a proposal of sponsorship, then a challenge to make a race of it and finally a suggestion that, if Milton delayed his flight until May, Branson would put up a prize of $1,000,000 for the first to make it round the world. Milton was not prepared to delay his flight, which he wanted to start in March to ensure that he could cross Bangladesh before the arrival of the monsoon, but the threat of the race was to remain with him throughout the flight. His chosen route was a circuitous one following Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg. This meant that, had Branson’s sponsored team started racing, taking the shortest possible route and using all Virgin’s contacts with civil aviation authorities, Brian would face a serious threat.
Relations with Newlyn could not have been worse. He threatened to resign on three different occasions and actually did so once but somehow remained the project’s media consultant, mainly because the sponsor found it easier dealing with him than directly with Milton.
At last on 24 March 1998 Brian and Keith were ready to fly from Brooklands, the historic motor racetrack, now an aircraft museum. They had the band of the RAF Regiment to play them off and an escort of thirty microlights to accompany them over the Channel. That day they covered 400 miles, reaching St Dié, just short of the Maritime Alps. This was all quite civilised flying, but their first crisis came on the fourth day, when they were flying over the Adriatic towards Corfu. All their communications died, both between each other and with the outside world.
They had agreed that they would take turns to pilot the craft on alternate days and that day it was Keith’s turn. He elected to keep going, managing to reach a Jordanian airliner on the emergency radio frequency so that they could warn Corfu airport that they didn’t have proper air-to-ground communication. So far, the flight had gone well. Even better, Brian found that he had lost the fear that had plagued him on his flight to Australia. He seemed to be getting over his phobia. It was just as well, for they were now heading for trouble. Greece had recently been hit by the worst storm in living memory and was still suffering the aftermath. They were buffeted by fierce winds in the mountain valleys leading to Athens but kept going and then pushed on to Rhodes. Brian was enjoying himself, commenting: ‘I remember thinking half a dozen times that day how happy I was to be there. There was nowhere else in the world, even when fighting the horror conditions in the “Valley of Death” near Thisye, that I would rather have been. It was as life should be, on the edge and going somewhere. My usually restless mind was at ease with itself.’
In many wa
ys it was a strange kind of adventure, similar to the experiences of wartime aircrew. The risk and danger and wild open spaces of sky and cloud are all there during flight, and in the case of their microlight with its puny engine and its trike, open to the elements, the sense of vulnerability must have been even greater. Yet they were flying from airport to airport, in itself quite frightening as they came in behind the giant airliners with the risk of turbulence. But then, once on the ground, they were back into urbanised living, with hassles over Customs and flight plans, of where to shelter GT Global, and finally getting a taxi to the nearest motel, where in most cases they could get a bath, steak and chips and a cool beer. In this respect it was very different from the life of the mountaineer or long-distance sailor or even the balloonist who divorces himself from the comforts of the land for the duration of his flight.
Nevertheless the adventures in the air could be all too frightening and varied. They had crossed the Mediterranean from Cyprus, taking off from the British air base at Akrotiri behind an American U2 spy plane. They approached the coast of Lebanon and then, as directed by air traffic control, flew into Syria with some apprehension, since a friendly reception was not always guaranteed. They had to fly round Israel to reach Jordan, where Brian had been well entertained by King Hussein on his Australian flight. Once there they would be among friends.
As they flew low over the Syrian desert they were suddenly aware of a MiG-21 banking across their course. GT Global was fifteen miles from the Jordanian border. They had no wireless contact with the fighter plane. It was a huge dark menacing shape, twisting and banking to either side of their craft and buffeting them in its slipstream. They just kept going, creeping all too slowly towards the safety of the frontier. What did it want, would it fire, had it been authorised to bring them down? It came past them even more slowly and dropped its undercarriage, the universal signal to land. But they could not as the terrain below was too rough. They were now only five miles from the frontier. They kept going and the plane just turned away and left them. Had it had any authorisation, or was it just playing its own bullying game with the puny yellow microlight? They had just enough fuel to reach Amman, where they had a warm welcome and were driven to the Hotel Intercontinental as guests of King Hussein.
They were doing well. It was only day nine and they were flying over Saudi Arabia. Brian had hoped to follow the pipeline but was told that there were too many secret installations along its route and therefore he would have to cross the empty desert further to the south. The desert turned out not to be too empty and they were able to follow a long straight road, giving soporific and monotonous flying until the engine began to overheat. One of the advantages of a microlight is that you can land it easily on a road. They waited for a good gap in the traffic and put it down. They couldn’t see anything wrong with the engine, but the overflow bottle was full of dark rather oily water, definitely a bad sign. They topped it up with their own spare water supply and begged some from passing motorists, before pulling out into a gap in the traffic and taking off, only to overheat again.
This time they were less lucky. They landed by a large puddle of water, but almost immediately a car carrying an army lance corporal stopped. He asked to see their passports, confiscated them and told them they would have to come with him. Brian eventually persuaded him to allow them to fly to the nearby airfield, with him, still in possession of their passports, following in his car.
It was dusk and, by the time they were in the air, it was pitch dark. The engine was overheating again and so they made a landing on the darkened road, which was much more difficult than during the day. They topped the engine up with more water and took off once again. This time they just made it to Qaysumah airfield. Keith spent the next day trying to isolate the problem in close discussion on the phone with the engine manufacturers back in England. He couldn’t find a fault and yet whenever he made a test flight the engine overheated. Eventually Keith said, ‘We’re going to need a new engine’.
Back in England the manufacturer worked through the night to modify the engine for GT Global and put it on a plane to Riyadh next morning. It stuck briefly in Customs but by the following day it was delivered to Qaysumah. Keith fitted it and they were ready to fly with only three days lost. They took off into the hot blue desert sky and the engine temperature soared with exactly the same symptoms as before. Once again they landed on the road, this time near what looked like some kind of garage, and once again, tempers ragged, they grappled with the problem. The coolant was nearly empty. It couldn’t be the engine, so it must be the way it was mounted in the trike. They tried to clear anything that could possibly interfere with the flow of air through the radiator, removed the panniers and strapped the contents to different parts of their strange machine, all done in a temperature of 40 °C. They took off once again and this time the engine temperature remained constant. They had solved what had turned out to be a simple problem at a huge cost of a replacement engine and a great deal of mounting stress between them.
At Dharan, Keith was able to make a more long-term modification to the aircraft, tying the radiator to one of the wheel struts. Their machine was looking more and more like an Emmet cartoon construction but the overheating problem had been solved. If anything, their engine was now operating below its most efficient temperature. They flew on into the Gulf of Oman to reach Muscat. Their goal of ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ was still very attainable. The flight over Pakistan and India went smoothly but they were getting into more challenging regions. The mountains of Laos and Vietnam brought greater turbulence and the threat of thunderstorms. It was also becoming more difficult on a bureaucratic level with visas, flight plans and permissions. Grey clouds, forested mountainsides and implacable officials all crowded in. They lost a day at Luang Prabang because of torrential rain and visa problems. On the morning of 18 April, on day twenty-six, it was still cloudy but Brian thought they should give it a try. Keith disagreed. The discussion became heated, Keith accusing Brian of shouting, screaming and bulldozing him into flying.
The weather improved slightly through the morning and Keith, who had at first sat with his face in his hands, began checking the GPS and his maps. Then, without a word, he picked up his flying suit and started preparing GT Global for flight. They set out with hardly a word being spoken between them. There were still clouds around but they could pick their way between the layers, flying over the forested mountainous jungle in which the Viet Cong and young American GIs had fought. Gradually Keith relaxed and they began talking again, excited and pleased to have crossed Vietnam and to be descending into Hanoi. They were given a hero’s welcome and were told they were the first microlight to reach the capital of Vietnam.
Their elation was short lived. Though they had not been turned down, they still did not have permission to cross China. The authorities continued to prevaricate, despite the valiant efforts of the British Embassy in Beijing, and the days slipped by. Ensconced in their Hanoi hotel bedrooms, Brian and Keith occasionally communicated by phone and met for a beer each night. The British Embassy had made them warmly welcome. At the end of one embassy party they were taken on to a nightclub called Apocalypse Now, replete with the nose of an American Huey helicopter and Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ blaring out from the speakers. The fifth morning saw success at last. Prince Michael of Kent was visiting China and his intercession with the Chinese vice-premier had gained their permission. They could fly that day and would be the first microlight ever to cross China.
It was misty and they had a range of 7,000-foot mountains between them and Nanning in China but they set out nonetheless. They were now eight days behind schedule. They glimpsed steep forest-clad slopes and narrow serpentine valleys through breaks in the cloud. A forced landing could easily have been fatal. It was nearly dusk when they reached Nanning and were guided down in excellent English by the local air traffic controller. Some of the airport staff, who had been following their flight on the internet, found them a commodi
ous garage in which to put the craft and carried them off to a good hotel and quantities of beer.
Next morning it was stormy, but they set off flying over exquisitely patterned farmland towards a cloud-girt range of mountains. Keith was in the pilot’s seat and decided to reach 7,000 feet to find a gap in the cloud layers but these soon closed down. They could not see the mountains below, were flving on their instruments and dependent on their hand-held GPS for direction, which Brian called out in as calm a voice as he could possibly manage. That day they flew 342 miles, most of it in cloud, only coming out of it just short of Macau to fly over the flat coastal plain to make their landing.
A short easy flight to Hong Kong and they were back to frightening, stressful flying up the coast of China in heavy cloud. There was no question of sitting out the weather in the comfort of a Hong Kong four-star hotel; they had too much time to catch up. Once again they were dependent on their instruments. Brian wrote: ‘Blind panic in such situations is dangerous. You are aware that you could spiral out of the sky, so you fall back on technique and suppress your fears. There is only the faintest inkling of how awesomely fearful it is and that provides gallons of adrenaline. We were undersupplied with blind flying instruments, but the turn and bank indicator paid for itself a hundred times over in those minutes of blind descent.’
Eventually they managed to get below the cloud over the sea and they could see the coastline through marching curtains of rain. They were soon soaked and worried about how well their instruments would stand up to the wet. They had been heading for Fuzhou, but headwinds had held them back so they decided to land at a small airfield on the island of Xiamen. They had just sufficient visibility to discern some power cables and made their landing in the gloom. They had a warm welcome which turned a little sour when a giggling girl presented Brian with a landing charge of $850. They were the first private aircraft of any kind that had arrived at Xiamen. Brian laughed at the bill and after some haggling it was reduced to $550. They reached Fuzhou the following morning, managing to haggle the landing charge down from $850 to $100 this time, and continued on their way, flying over chequered farmland and more mountains which were as rugged as those of Vietnam.
Quest for Adventure Page 44
